UK National Health Service reforms II

“Management matters. Without it, nothing happens. From deciding on and
buying the weekly grocery shop to designing, building and running the giant
atom-smasher at Cern, nothing effective happens without budgeting, scheduling
and implementation.” (The future of leadership and management in the NHS,
The King´s Fund, 2011)

Nonetheless “Management” is often associated with terms like bureaucracy or
even considered a millstone around an organisation´s neck. Why is that? In his
presentation “The Experience of the Healthcare Manager” Dr Edward Granter
(Manchester Business School) showed clearly, that there is a traditio-historical
and archaic picture of the “typical manager”. Especially middle-level managers
are in bad odour. Their counterparts, the health care professionals in the NHS,
are seen as the “real” heroes, the people who get the job done. Hardly surprising,
that there have been animated discussions on this issue over the last fifty years.
The most important question seemed to have been: “How can we find an
accomplished combination and who´s in charge?”Alongside with the division of
management-tasks there is also a discussion on leadership and how it should
look like.

In a breath they suggest “The „post-heroic‟ model of leadership”, where – in
short – a form of distributed leadership is postulated. If I have understood
correctly, they aim for “No more heroes” in the NHS but somehow or other for
more heroes across a broad front, who grasp the nettle and collaborate
interdisciplinarily.